Full J. Z. Smith Interview

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Full J. Z. Smith interviewJ.Z. Smith refuses to use the Internet, but you can still read the full text of this two-hour interview here.

by Supriya Sinhababu - Jun 2, 2008 7:00 am CDT

Supriya Sinhababu: I’ve interviewed a fairnumber of people, but you are by far the mostdifficult I’ve ever had to contact. Why is that?

J. Z. Smith: Well, I despise the telephone. That’sprobably why. I don’t like it. I’ll reveal my age, butI don’t like the notion [that] for a nickel…anyonecould get a hold of me any time they want. I thinkthe cell phone is an absolute abomination. I don’tunderstand people really needing to take a telephonewith them. I have one in the kitchen, and it has ananswering machine, and I pay no attentionwhatsoever.

SS: How about e-mail?

JS: I’ve never used a computer.

SS: Never?

JS: No.

SS: So do you typewrite all your papers?

JS: Yup. Or handwrite them. I just gave a 90-pagepaper in California—just came back. I had to get anhonorary degree in Canada and take a flight from

PHOTO: CHRIS SALATA/THE CHICAGO MAROON

Full J. Z. Smith interview – The Chicago Maroon http://chicagomaroon.com/2008/06/02/full-j-z-smith-interview/

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J.Z. Smith Toronto to Los Angeles, which I do not recommend.Especially if you chain-smoke, it’s not a good trip.

But my son talked me into the patch. My God it works! My wife said she could stand me, and usually on theairline she can’t at all. She said I was relaxed. I didn’t think so, but that’s what she said. I had fantasies ofcigarettes all the way to California. But she thought I was relaxed, so she said, “Maybe you should always wearone!” She wouldn’t let me smoke with it on. But no, that one I gave with a handwritten paper.

No, I take Marx very seriously, I think [the computer] alienates the worker from his production—I do notunderstand. With a typewriter, I hit a key, and it goes bam. I understand that: I made that letter happen. Now, Ithen got one of these Smith-Corona things that has a little window. Allegedly you can delete things and so on. Andthat already bothered me because number one it’s mysterious, but number two it doesn’t have a bell at the end ofthe line. And all my life I’ve said, “Gee, that was a good day. I had a 30-bell day” or “I had an 80-bell day,” andElaine would say, “How’s it coming?,” and I’d say, “Three more bells!” So first I thought I’d get a hotel bell, but Ialso don’t like the idea that it decides when a word stops. And I like to put a hyphen in and decide myself wherethe word stops. Because to me it makes a big difference especially when reading something aloud. I could lose awhole syllable with this stupid thing. So I haven’t graduated past that, and now my Smith-Corona broke down, soI’m very happy because now I do everything by hand again. Because then it’s mine!

SS: What got you interested in the religions that you study?

JS: Because they’re funny. They’re interesting in and of themselves. They relate to the world in which I live, butit’s like a fun house mirror: Something’s off. It’s not quite the world I live in, yet it’s recognizable. So that gapinterested me. And so I specialized in religions that are dead, which has the great advantage that nobody talksback. No one says, “That’s not what I heard last Sunday!” Everybody’s dead. And I like that. Now, I sometimeshave to deal with religions that keep going. And they’re more problematic because then you deal with people whobelieve things. They also find their own beliefs puzzling or challenging or interesting—they’re almost synonyms.So they have not only their beliefs, but their interpretations of those beliefs. And I have my interpretations of theirbeliefs. Sometimes we can sit like this and negotiate it. Other times it’s in a book or transcript. And then in a thirdsense you have to run back and forth. You have to represent both sides of the conversation as you try to figure outwhat it’s all about. You get good at doing that with dead people because you’ll never hear from them because youhave to do it all the time.

And that’s what a historian does. They run back and forth to make both sides of a conversation happen. I alsothink that whether you like it or you don’t like it, it’s been a part of the world, and remains a part of the world thathas a lot to do with what people do. And so I think if you think it’s a worthwhile task to try to understand otherpeople, then you probably haven’t given up on trying to understand yourself. Then you would call religion a peril.We see bad results from countries or other countries’ religions. But you don’t have to go to war over it, you couldjust piss somebody off. So it’s a question of a world that, whether an individual sees themselves as religious, thereis still enough embedded in the culture in which they live [that], to some degree, the eyeglasses through whichthey look at the world are shaped by those religions.

I started off originally in grass breeding. That was what I wanted to do with my life. I went to a farm, becausesince if you’re a city boy going [to] an agricultural school which is free, you have to prove that you can stand incow shit, so they send you to a barn for a while. I did that, and I loved it. It still remains to this day the best thing Iever did in my life. But it was a bad time in Cornell’s history. They would let you take no liberal arts courses: Itwas all part of the agriculture which was my program. And for my interests I had a program called elementarycorn development. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen corn roots but they’re only about this big. So to thinkthere were people intermediate and advanced ahead of me—I mean I had lots of other interests! So I said, “Whatabout history, philosophy, things like that?” and they said, “Well, you’re at an agricultural school which is free. Ifyou went to Cornell University, then of course….” So I said, “What if I paid a little money?” and they said no. SoI went to the headmaster of the high school and told him what had happened. He said, “You’re such a stubborn son


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of a bitch. It probably would have taken you two years to realize agriculture wasn’t for you. But that’s good,you’ll go to Haverford; they’ll figure you out there.” So that’s what I did. He made a phone call—in the old days,there was the old-boy network that everyone is so worried about. So I never applied to college, because Cornelljust took me as a junior, and Haverford got a phone call, so I went.

And the first day there I met this remarkable man in the philosophy department, Mark Foss, and I think largely,education is an “Oh, when I grow I’d like to be like this” sort of affair. This was a guy—wow. So I became aphilosophy major. I met him by accident. I was so enthralled. I went to this one place in the library that looked likethe only place you could smoke. There were all these comfortable chairs. Turns out it was a shrine where Quakerphilosophers would study. And if there was one place where no one had ever smoked before, that was it. So there Iwas, happy as could be. There were these armchairs that extended out six feet, and you could sit and put your legsup. But anyway, there I was. Then a man came in. Then some other students came in, and there was supposed tobe a senior philosophy seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. And from Marx I had read some Hegel, notthat one, but I knew some vocabulary. And I was absolutely enthralled by his way of talking. So that afternoon Ibecame a philosophy major. And then when it got time to go to graduate school, I asked another philosophyprofessor—when I got interested in a problem that people were worried about for much of the earlier 20th century,how myth and philosophy interrelate. Mostly philosophers yell at myths; nonetheless, if you read them carefully,you’ll see how much they’ve been appropriated. So I thought I would like to do that, but not with Greek myth.And so I went to another philosophy professor—Mark had retired by then—and I said where can I go to studyGreek myths. He said, “Why don’t you go to Yale Divinity School and study the New Testament, it’s the biggestpiece of Greek myth that’s still around.”

SS: [Laughs]

JS: See, you’re smarter than I am. I didn’t catch it as a joke. So I went to Yale Divinity School to study the NewTestament, and here I am. But I still don’t know that there’s a place where you could get a degree in such asubject. You might persuade a classics department. You might persuade a history of art department. You’d reallyhave to talk a blue streak to do it. And I think nowadays you’d probably have to go construct your own major incollege, because they’re very unimaginative. I don’t know why I said they—we’re all very unimaginative.Philosophy was no good for me after college because it was in the height of its analytic phase, and you certainlyweren’t going to go study mythology with these guys. They’re arguing about whether what I just said made anysense, let alone blue, green people climbing in trees or something; it’s not for them. So I knew I couldn’t go onunless I radically changed what I thought I was doing. So then I’ve taught religion ever since. Some saypeculiarly, but nonetheless I’ve taught it.

Usually something on one of the old religions. Usually something on the Bible, because that’s what a lot of peoplelike to talk about and usually something on the anthropology of religion, I guess you’d call it. I tried always to becomparative. We never look at one thing; we always look at more than one thing. Even years ago when I used toteach a course, Bibles in Western Civ, which was then a Western Civ requirement, for three quarters I would dothe Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon as “the Bibles of the West.” Becauseit doesn’t have just one Bible, it has a bunch of Bibles, and we might as well take a look at them. Even that makesit simpler than it is, because it depends on whose New Testament you look at, whether it has 24 books, 27 books,or 38 books, and so on. I think that’s what got me interested in grass—how many kinds of grass there are. I’mfascinated by how many kinds of religions there are, how many kinds of Bibles there are. Linnaeus gave us a wayof talking about the diversity of grasses. I don’t think looking at their sex organs is the most interesting way, butnonetheless he gave us a way of talking. Some types of grass, if you’ve dealt with them, have very small littleorgans. You have to use a tiny brush that has one camel’s hair in it, and you have to go back and forth. But two,two will damage it already, it’s that strong. I still have one brush left. I haven’t used it for years. I keep it toremember. I could have spent my life with a binocular microscope going like this: [Smith makes brushstrokes inthe air]. Good to remember.


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SS: Do you still do that anymore?

JS: No, I don’t. I do fool around in the garden, and grow certain grasses that grow wild around here that I’vetransplanted. This new popularity of ornamental grasses—they’re basically grasses that have a hard timesurviving, because they’re so ornamental. I have ordinary grass, common, but I like its shape, so I have abouteight kinds.

SS: You mentioned that your teaching style is peculiar. Can you describe what you mean by that?

JS: Oh, I don’t know. Well, first of all, given the range of religions I teach, the issue of where I stand in relation tothem is moot. And most people who teach religion have a clear relationship with the religions. I cannot.Obviously, most of them are dead, I would get in trouble with the ASPCA [American Society for the Preventionof Cruelty to Animals] if I sacrificed a bull ox to Zeus. I have a friend who recently died, but he actually decidedto show kids what a sacrifice looks like, so he sacrificed a lamb at Easter time. “We talk about it so much—here’swhat it looks like!” Half the class puked, half the class had angry letters from mommy and daddy. But he diddemonstrate that it’s not just a metaphor. It’s a messy and not altogether pleasant process. Since [then] we’veconverted it entirely into an economic question. I ask students the meaning of sacrifice, and they always starttalking about “mommy and daddy sacrificing so I could go to college.” We’ve been at war for four years, and Ihaven’t heard one person yet say some soldier sacrificed themselves. That language is gone. It’s entirelyeconomic. One kid whose name I sent to the Development Office said sacrifice was joining a golf club for the fouryears that he was here, so he would have money to go to Europe when he graduated. I thought Development oughtto keep an eye on that kid. I rarely do that, but I turned him in. That’s just his notion, but it’s the same idea—it’seconomic: “I give up something now to get a better thing in the future.” Well that’s a shitty theory of sacrifice. Butthat’s the kind of thing I try to do, I try to make students answer questions, and not in class, but in writing.

On the whole I don’t teach seminars. I used to teach a lot of seminars. It’s a young man’s game. Some people like[U of C Classics professor James] Redfield can keep it up. I can’t; it’s very tiring. To really keep track of whateverybody’s saying is like a computer dating service—”You should really talk to him,” or “Come on, stoptalking!”—it’s like conducting an orchestra. And I can’t do it any longer. So I mostly talk. And I let them talk backin writing basically. And sometimes I’ll identify who asked something—it depends on how many people are in theroom. If there’s 20, I’ll identify them. If there’s 80, I won’t. I try, I suppose, very hard—someone once saidreligion is a topic you have to un-teach before you teach, because in some sense, everybody comes in with an ideain their head, so they’re obviously sure that they know something about it. Your job is to suggest, without beingincredibly in their face, that they don’t. So you have to take it apart, respectfully, but nonetheless take it apart. Andsometimes you try juxtaposing it to something, you sometimes try asking an awful long question about it,sometimes you play dumb. Sometimes you do some history, say, “You know, it wasn’t always like you just said,”and there’s a reason behind why you’re saying what you’re saying, because something happened that causedpeople to talk like that. No one until Charles Darwin ever knew the Bible had no errors. No one in the history ofChristianity has ever claimed until Christianity that the Bible had no errors, so why suddenly did they have toannounce the Bible had no errors, at the beginning of the 20th century? It’s not an internal religious movement,it’s what they perceive as an external threat. Of course after that you drop the second shoe, which is, the sentencecontinues: “It’s only an error in the original autograph.” Well, fat chance you and I are ever going to see that one!And fat chance there ever was one, incidentally. The whole damn thing, written down in the same handwriting, allat once? No way. So you ask questions. That’s what you do. And most religions that are interesting spend a lot oftime asking questions.

The difference I think is when religion is left alone to ask questions, they can actually be far more daring than Ican be in a classroom. And usually people who ask questions are fairly comfortable with their religion. They askthe craziest—I mean I wouldn’t dare ask some of these questions. But they’re never going to leave, because theanswer to that question—that’s who they are, and they just want to find out more about it. And if it leads them to


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things that make them say, “My God, yuck,” they’re still not going to say, “So, tomorrow I’m going to join someother group.” Whereas when you deal with a mixed audience, when you deal with somebody else’s faith, it getstricky.

I loved teaching Self, Culture, and Society. It was I think my favorite teaching I’ve done here. And I would comein the winter quarter when they did religion, with Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, all those good people. And one year weread a book about education by Derek Bok and another former president of another university, called somethinglike The Shape of the River, and it was an argument basically for the educational requirement for diversity. It wasthe book the University of Michigan used before the Supreme Court to make its argument about what Republicanslike to call quotas. They’re targets. A quota means you have to reach it. A target means you try, and there’s a bigdifference, and they know damn well there’s a big difference—anyway, that’s neither here nor there. It’sremarkable because since they were the president of Princeton and the president of Harvard, they got access toeverybody in the business and they got access to everybody’s files. And so they were able to give us longitudinalsurveys of attitudes over a 20-, 30-year period. Alumni associations have polls, Harvard has a continual poll thatthey bother people with until they die. Some other places do the same thing. And they tried to summarize—and Iwas fascinated by a discrepancy, it seemed to me, in two questions. They said, “Do you think it is important to goto school with people of other cultures?” And I don’t care what population you were looking at, the answer wasalways in the high nineties. Old, young, black, white, rich, poor—not so poor, for the surveys these places weredoing—but still, everyone said, “Yes, it’s important educationally to go to school with someone from differentcultures.”

But 150 pages later, they said, “Do you think it’s important to go to school with someone of different beliefs?”Thirty-eight percent was the highest “yes” on that one. I looked at that. I said, “You know, I don’t consider myclassroom a zoo where I have to have a specimen of every animal. So clearly what I want is I want people fromdifferent places because they bring with them different beliefs. So what the hell is the difference between thosetwo?” As interviewers sometimes do, they reword the same question and ask it. I asked Bok, who I know, and hesaid, “No, no, that wasn’t it at all.” He hadn’t noticed the discrepancy. Well I said, “You’re no God damn use, I’llask my students.” They’re the ones who presumably fill out things like this, so I asked them. And they thought Iwas crazy to think there was a contradiction. First of all for them the word belief means only religious. I’d neverquite realized this before. They don’t have beliefs about science, or beliefs about Obama or beliefs about War andPeace. They only have beliefs about religion. If you say “what do you think about…” that’s not beliefs! Sosomehow beliefs isn’t about thinking about, first of all; that’s the first thing I learned from my students.

Secondly, though we had read Clifford Geertz’s arguments, which tell you that culture, science, everything is amatter of belief, they obviously didn’t believe him. And that pissed me off, because I’d just given out some As fortheir reading of Clifford Geertz. And now they’re telling me religion is the only thing you could believe in. Allright. Now I’m beginning to catch on, aha. Well if they all read it that way, yeah I guess I see, but still. Didn’t theyknow different beliefs were going to come with all these different cultures, even if it’s religion? I thought it wasfascinating and horrifying—the students weren’t horrifying but it was…. If there was someone from some placeelse, if there was someone from India, I could go to their house, I could like their food, I could like the samosasand go home. Or I could go to an ethnic fair and enjoy all the different—and that’s a zoo!—all the differentdances, foods, costumes, and all of that, and I go home. If I like someone else’s religion, I have to leave andconvert. I can’t go home. And I listened to that, and I thought, “My God. Your choice is to be a tourist or to be aconvert, there’s nothing in between.” There’s a whole world in between! You don’t have to run fast through amuseum from Greek art through French impressionism, watching your clock because you have to go to a naturalhistory museum in a couple hours. You don’t have to do that. There’s other things you could do. You could slowdown a little bit. But you also don’t have to become an apostle—there’s a lot of room in between. And that reallygot me all reanimated about this business. I was quite struck—and I suspect they were telling me much the samethings from the minds of the [surveyed] people, that explains the gap.

I thought that was quite amazing. So the question is, how can you look, like you look at a museum at something,


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look at it, without having to run to something else right away, but without saying—I’ve seen very few paintingswhere I’d like to live in what I see, but it doesn’t stop you from looking at them for a while, trying to figure out,“What the hell’s going on here, how did they do that?” You know, all the questions you ask yourself. The samekind of thing should somehow happen in the world of beliefs, even religious beliefs.

SS: So do you consider yourself one of those people who’s in-between?

JS: Oh, I would hope so. In between is where you always are. In between is where you always are. If you wantone word from me I’m a translator. That’s what I do. I translate in both directions. But what you have to rememberis, it’s like the original autograph, there’s no original in this business. So, I’m translating other folks’ translationsof who they think they are or what some figure said, or for that matter I’m translating the translation of the figurewho said it. And so, you’re always in the middle, because translation’s always in the middle. It can’t impose itslanguage on someone else’s language. On the other hand, if it just repeats the other person’s language, it ain’ttranslated. I have colleagues in the religion business who think that’s what we ought to do. We ought to repeattheir language. We ought to get them to sign off on our version of their language. Nonsense! Translation changesthings, there’s no doubt about it. I can’t imagine any author has been fully satisfied with a translation of theirwork, even if they translated it themselves. So if I can’t get the author to sign off on their own translation, why thehell—and who am I going to ask?

There’s an example, of a great scholar, also named Smith—Wilfred Cantwell Smith, just died a couple yearsago—that was his fundamental principle. His specialty was particularly in Islam, and he held that if he saidsomething about Islam, they had to sign off on it. And I said “Wilfred, the difference between you and me is thatI’m at Harvard and you’re at Chicago. You’re rich, I’m poor. Who are you calling up? My God, what a phone bill!I mean, you’re calling up the entire Muslim world, and asking what they think of your sentence? Because if not, Iwant to know how you picked out the person you asked. And I suspect you picked him out because he talks justlike you!” And then you’re asking a mirror,”‘How do I look today?” I mean, it’s a crazy idea. Call up the wholeworld and ask them, “What do you think about what I was about to say? Every sentence?” I mean good lord, whata bill. I think even with the cell phones, I see all the ads say “unlimited”—I don’t think they had that in mind. Sono. Now, there are some self-appointed loudmouths who say ‘unless I approve of what you say’—but who the hellappointed them? So, you know, with Wendy Doniger you get in trouble with the self-appointed guardians, orsomething or other. But that’s just…you get in trouble anyway. It’s a pissed-off believer or a pissed-off parent.You get in trouble anyway in this business. Sooner or later, you do something someone’s not going to like.Because their son or daughter translated what you said. And then they translated hearing the son or the daughter.And so it’s the same issue. It’s the glory and the problem of speech.

But it would be terrible if we did everything in the unambiguous world of mathematics. Here’s a speech designednot to have any of these problems, to be international, to have no ambiguity of any of that. I mean, it has its uses,but what an awful way to go around all day. I can’t imagine. It would be a very odd conversation. I’m sure wewouldn’t laugh once. They’re very funny people, mathematicians, but always when they stop beingmathematicians they’re funny. I guess they have to be, having spent all day talking like that.

SS: I know one of the people you’ve criticized is Joseph Campbell. What’s it like to take on big fish like that?

JS: He’s a good friend, so that makes it easier in a way. He could drink like a fish. He could recite Ulysses andFinnegan’s Wake in a fake drawl for hours. Of course, who knew if he was right or wrong half the time, butnonetheless he could do it. And since he wrote the skeletal key to Finnegan’s Wake I presume he probably does infact know it. But every now and then he’d come to a passage that I love that would come out as far as I canrecall—of course I had had a few drinks too—but it came out letter-perfect.

Joe makes it all easy! All myths are one! Well, see, I think that’s terrible. I really do. If that’s all it is, if all mythstell the story of a hero who at a certain stage in his life blah blah blah blah, why read more than one? For that


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matter, why not just read Joe Campbell? [That's] exactly what he had in mind. Now his popularity does notdepend on spirits. His popularity depends on his aura—legitimating the mysterious world of the East, legitimatingthe hunters and gatherers and their deep rapport with nature! “Oh, you like mushrooms? Mushrooms, too, let metell you about mushrooms”—Joe would affirm anything. He was terrific! It was a pleasure to be with him. Nowwith me he wouldn’t give this crap about the great mother or something like that, but I would sometimes go after asession of some meeting we both went to just utterly depressed with what I heard. But ten minutes with Joe and acouple of bourbons, and my God, it was great.

Now, we could do that. And it’s a gift. He had the gift of…oh, I don’t know…societies that still honor thestoryteller. We don’t, but he had the gift of a storyteller. He had the gift, unbelievable. And then the Irish drawlwould come out the more he drank, which made the stuff more lilting…. But this is a business—and I don’t thinkwe show students enough of this—but this is a business that lives by high noons. It’s shoot-’em-ups and rewards.Your job, in part, is to take somebody down. Their reputation shouldn’t be a big deal, but obviously it is.

I say it when I gave those annual lectures for the social science core that human science is fortunate, I have to say.We can’t experiment on our subject matter. If I want to show what modernization does to a tribe, I’m really notallowed to sneak in a computer and hide in the bushes and just watch what happens. There are ethics committeesthat stop you from doing things like that. So you torture—there’s a sentence in Foucault that says experimentalscience is the torture of the elements, to make it talk. Well with real people, you can’t do that. The only way aperson in the human sciences can experiment is with their mouth. We experiment by talking, by arguing, by tryingsomething out—what if?—and see what happens. But we can’t throw it in an acid bath. So the only thing that wehave is to have someone come in backing us. That’s it. That’s not proof. But it strengthens a position or weakens aposition. But it’s really terribly important that if the human sciences are sciences at all, they have to havesomething analogous to experiment. So talk is one of those. Comparing is another one. Experiment interferes withwhatever it’s looking at. It’s not watching a natural process just going along naturally. It sticks a pin in or dropssome irritant on it or does something to it or smashes it in a multibillion dollar hole. But comparing is doingsomething—bringing two things that have no reason in creation to be in the same pond together—throw them inand see what happens. It’s the same thing you do when you interfere with largely, fortunately, an inorganicsubstance, but certainly we do try to cure diseases. We interfere with bodies, we interfere with bodily fluids, andwe drop something in and see.

And that’s all I do. I look at the Book of Mormon in relationship to the Koran. I’m dropping one in the other’spond to see what happens. So to me, if we’re a science, we have to have something analogous to an experiment.Bernard really made a deep impression on me, his book on experimental biology, because he moved it to theliving realm, away from the inorganic. And he didn’t worry—it was just animals he was working on, whocared?—he didn’t have an ethical bone in his body about all this stuff, did ghastly things with them. But hedefined experiments as exactly this, the process of interfering. And that made an enormous impression on mebecause that’s what I do think comparison does, among other things. There’s no natural comparison. There’s noreason to put something next to something else. You decide to do that, and in a certain sense change its context,because now that context is that other thing that you brought it to.

SS: Have you had students that questioned their religious beliefs?

JS: Yes. I think that comes with doing a course in religion, that people use it for that perfectly reasonable use. I’msure political science has the same thing. Again, beliefs is a bigger category than religion, so I think that anyonewho deals with what’s mostly called beliefs, worldviews, point of view, I don’t care what word we use. In parttheir class is intended to help them to settle. I mean they come with various expectations, and they will come andtalk to you about them. You tread very softly. You try to get them—you certainly don’t have an answer for them,so you try to get them to talk it out. What you try to urge them to do is to try to use some of the language we’vebegun to use in class. So at least there’s a public language—and that’s what language helps us do, it helps us bringour private world out into public without necessarily dragging every inch of our guts along the way. So if I can


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help them really think about their problems, but not underline the word “their,” underline the word “problem,” Ithink that’s the best I can do. After that, it’s friends, loved ones, ministers, et al., who move in. That’s not where Igo. But I do think that most people’s problems with their beliefs, whether they’re religious or not—it’s not the firsttime this has come up, and there are people who have spent a lot of time thinking about that. So part of what youdo is say, “Why you don’t you look at thus-and-so, that might help you at least find a language to talk about this.”It’s bad enough that you’re having problems; it’s even worse that you have to invent a whole new language to talkabout it. I don’t have to read your diary, and I won’t. But where you are, others have been before, and some havemade important contributions as a result of that. So that’s the best you can do.

I would estimate that a thousand religions die each year. We’re very limited in our sense of how many religionsthere are. And I’d say that a thousand come into being each year. A religion that survives its founder’s death isdoing well. But we still tend to have a much more limited view of the resources that are available to think aboutthings. When people have problems, some people have general problems, but most have a particular problem.They want to say no, I want to say yes, that’s usually what happens. Well, they’ve thought of all of that, so [I]said, “Go look!” The point of saying how many religions there are is to say that no religion, despite the way theysometimes talk, no religion’s belief depends on a single thing. Because there hasn’t been a religion that hasn’tchanged its belief structure multiple times if it’s lasted more than that one year. And one of things about religion isthey take it all! They talk about everything! They’re not like most of who think they have a certain expertise sothey pick their beliefs about this narrow range of things, and they’re doing pretty good. You know, don’t ask mewhat to do in the present market; I’m next to useless. For one contemplating retirement, that’s an importantquestion. You go out with the value of what it is the day you go out.

SS: I was going to ask you that actually, are you retired?

JZ: No. I’m slowly edging. I’m in my 40th year here, and I’m 70 years of age, so it’s getting to be time to at leastthink about how to make a graceful exit. Every time I’ve really gotten almost to the point of doing it I haven’tbeen able to. So that’s where we stand.

Anyway, most people having a problem actually have a problem. And yes, there are dramatic statements. MartinLuther says, “What think you of Jesus Christ is the only question!” Well that’s the only question, but whathundreds of questions are wrapped up in that question? Religions will try to simplify themselves, strip off thethings—they say, “Well, those are not so essential.” But nobody needs to leave any religion over a single issue.Because fortunately, unlike some of our political groups, there are no single-issue religions. There really aren’t.Part of the problem is they have no modesty. So they’ll talk about everything, and have a belief about it, and itmakes them fun. It also makes them asses sometimes. It does both. If your religion’s been around a while, most ofthe members of that religious tradition haven’t read all the literature of that tradition, that they get told is “this,which is it.” The Golden Rule. The Gita. The Koran. They also, almost all of them, are a piece of a much longerwork. In almost any field, if you’re going to take a piece of something, you’d better take a look at the whole.

And that’s where issues start. So it seems to me when someone has got the picture of the religion that it’s sort ofthe Reader’s Digest version, it’s been condensed down. Campbell’s stuff, it always shows you all the variety andcondenses it down to the same thing. It’s just too damn rich to do that to it. I mean, you ask me what I get out of it.I always tell him to me that I get a feeling of the absolute wonder of the human imagination. It’s unstoppable. It’sfunny, it’s sort of a game among analytic philosophers when they discuss religion to invent something crazy andthen talk about how you could invent it. And I always ask them, “Why are you working so hard to inventsomething? I could show you a hundred crazier things than you could come up with that are in somebody’s mostsacred writings.” It’s mind-boggling.

And the one who challenged me on it was someone who had a living rock. It could only go “woo!” or “uh.” Andhow do you work out the grammar of “woo!” and “uh”? And I said, “You don’t tell me how the woos got there.You don’t tell me how these woos and uhs got there. I mean, you’re a shitty mythmaker!” So I just picked up one


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yesterday—the world is a spider web, formed of the dripping, green semen of another spider that goes down thevarious parts of the web—I don’t know what you call them, filaments—and congeals here and there. So now youwant to talk about rationality—man, you deal with that. To hell with your woos and uhs. And that’s only the firstparagraph. The myth goes on for I think about 700 paragraphs actually. It’s a Brazilian native myth. Wow! I lookat that, I’ve never taught it, but I look at that…it’s not that I want to understand it so much. I just want to say,“Hats off to you kids! You sold it to generations and generations! Woo! Terrific! Wonderful!” That’s what I likeabout religion, it never fails to surprise me. Whenever you think you’ve seen it all, you find something like thisthat—”Whoops, back to the drawing board. My definition has not been broad enough. I have to get this one intoo.” It’s good. It’s good subject matter. It doesn’t conclude, and that’s good too.

I’ve always said it would be nice to drop dead in class except for the shock to my students. My wife’s a pianoteacher, and she actually took a student whose teacher before her literally keeled over in the middle of this kid’slesson. So I don’t joke about dropping dead in the middle of class any longer. But I always try to—and I don’talways succeed—to end the last class on an incomplete sentence. And that to me is important. Don’t come to anending. I don’t think it’s true, I think it’s an artifact of the codex form, but the first page of the BabylonianTalmud…starts on the back side of the second page, I guess it was the title page—the copyright page! Neverunderestimate the ingenuity of a man making a sermon. It’s to teach us that we join the conversation in the middle,and the conversation 47 volumes later is still not finished. And I like that sense. I’ve always been sorry thatpolitical conservatives took up the phrase ‘the great conversation’ to mean only the books they approve of. Youhave the great pieces and all the rest are petty conversations. I always thought that was sad, because I thinkthat’s…what we really ought to do, and I’m not sure we still say this often enough, is that’s what we charge you somuch for. It’s conversation. And you might buy it; your parents won’t. That’s too bad. It really is. They wantefficiency, and I hate efficiency. Because it makes everything over too fast.

SS: [Takes several seconds to riffle back to the questions in her notebook] Let me just dig back through for myquestions here—

JS: What do you want to know, how tall I am? Before I began to shrink and stoop?

SS: [Laughs] I do really like your cane. I don’t know if you if you’ve heard of this website—probably not, but it’scalled Ratemyprofessors.com, and your reviews are glowing.

JS: I’ve never heard of such a thing. And I don’t like the idea.

SS: Well, a lot of people on this website are big fans of your cane.

JS: Well, I’ll tell you about this thing, because it’s botanical. This is a rhododendron. It grows from mama, itgrows from under the ground, and gets out from underneath mama—this is a parable—and it comes out fromunderneath. So it’s a natural cane. And what I didn’t know, from the spindly, shitty rhododendrons that we havearound here, that they grow to this length. I’ve seen photographs of them in England and they grow to be liketrees. Feel it, it’s very heavy! That’s not my picture of a rhododendron.

My uncle—Freud is the only one who would understand this—my uncle had two hip operations and after theywere both successful he turned to making canes as a hobby. I mean, to the rest of us—what is he trying to do? Ihave no idea. He made this one, in a wonderful phrase that I haven’t heard used properly since the ’60s—he wasdriving through the Smoky Mountains National Park, and he ‘liberated’ it from there. I haven’t heard that usagein—I don’t know how the hell he knew. He used to be a YMCA coach. I don’t know that they talk about liberatingthings much from a federal property. But he made three or four types of canes, and now I got, from his wife who’s95 and said she didn’t think she’ll need a cane much longer, so she gave me the cane he’d given her. It was a littlesmaller and a little shorter. It’s a two-handed job, this one, like so. [He demonstrates.] But the curve of it is funnyto grab with one hand.


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Well I think [Ratemyprofessors.com] is an awful idea. And what good does it do? I mean, I’ve been married fornearly 50 years, I’m not on the market. What other reason would one have for such a thing? It’s like reading a studbook.

No, I’ve been spared much by never—I’ve never seen the Internet. And my son endlessly explains to me that Ishould say that rather than “I’ve never seen the Web.” I haven’t seen that one either! He says I sound veryignorant if I say I’ve never seen the Web, but I sound like I know what I’m talking about—he has these tips for meas I grow older. He’s nearby, so he comes by to check on the two of us. My daughter’s in Oakland, so we fly outevery now and then to check on her.

SS: I was reading your essay on educational reform, “The Necessary Lie,” and—

JS: Oh, that one! Someone told me that’s also floating around in cyberspace.

SS: That’s right.

JS: I’m actually very angry about that. Those are notes! That’s not the talk. And it was a series. And either rightbefore or right after me was Wayne Booth, so I had to come up with something really smart-ass. He was the bestiron the campus had, so how do you out-iron the iron? What this begets—and that’s why not everything you doshould be public—is a talk that’s very situational. Certain talks, God knows I’ve given over and over again. Butthat one, that was a one-time only performance and deliberately done with one eye on Wayne the whole damntime.

I never knew it was there. I knew it was mimeographed and given to beginning graduate student teachers for oneor two years. Then I thought it died an honorable death. And then somebody actually sent me a contract becausehe printed it as the appendix to a book he wrote. He needed my permission—even though he assured me that sinceit’s out there, if I didn’t get, it was the first time I heard the words “intellectual property lawyer,” he was going toviolate it with impunity whether I said yes or no. It’s a book on religion; what the hell does ["A Necessary Lie"]have to do with religion? It’s an introduction to religion, and I guess he wanted to say at the end, “Religions havenecessary lying to them.” But it’s true. I think in there—I haven’t looked at it in a long time—I also said somethings about students and what they learn from us. And some of that is from real things, when I was younger andmore ambitious, and also could carry more. I used to just take the students’ books from them at some point in theclass and take them home and analyze, spend hours looking at what they underlined. And there’s a crack in there Ithink, we tell them, “It’s all the process,” and all they do is underline the conclusion or something. And I wasshocked to see, yes, some did that.

There was one kid who took a black marker and obliterated everything he thought was unimportant. So in hisDurkheim, there would be the word “totem,” and nothing else on the whole damn page! And I say, not that I didn’tknow because I looked at the page, “What’s here is details. Why do you think he put them in? He’s not ananthropologist. He didn’t go there. So why is he giving you all those details? So it’s all about totems—well he saidthat on the cover page, you know it’s about totems, so don’t underline totems. God damn it, that’s what the book’sabout.” I’ll tell you one thing, I said, “I wouldn’t want you for my doctor. Because for all I know the disease Ihave you eliminated on that page! It’s just details, get rid of it!” So that’s the difference. What’s the differencebetween you as an intern presenting a case history and Durkheim here presenting a case history? And thepresumption is that everything is potentially relevant. It may not be! It may be misleading. But for God’s sake!

So a lot of ["The Necessary Lie"] came out of teaching here. When I taught at Santa Barbara I had 800. When theyleft they wrote, “He had the hottest nightclub act in town.” I was offended for years. By God, I would spend 10hours getting ready for one 15-minute session and all they remember is that I tell jokes sometimes. Always with apoint, they’re parables! Sometimes. But all they could remember is they laughed. And the way some of themperformed, I suppose that is all they remember. Those weren’t the times for teachers because that was during the


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Vietnam War. And if you failed someone, you were going to kill them. It was a terrible time—certainly to be astudent, but to be a teacher as well. It’s the first time I evoked this principle of Marx because they had machine-scored exams. And I insisted on watching the machine do it. I said, “I can’t grade it, but I’m going to watch it.”And you know what? I found out it skipped 20 questions. So the students getting As did well—but the kids thatgot Bs were on their way to the selective service system! I mean this isn’t just a matter of being pissed off becauseyou got a lousy grade. This is sending you! You’re on your way kid! And the damn machine skipped the same 20questions all the way through the exam. And that’s when I learned what happens when you can’t see inside themachine. I finally started looking over here, and something wasn’t right. “Some glitch,” says the engineerchairman, “some glitch.” That’s why I trust no black box. Something that goes in here and comes out here, I don’ttrust. I do my Xeroxing one by one. Page down, peek underneath the thing, watch the little light go across, andthen I take it out and compare it to make sure—and then I put the next page down. It’s a black box otherwise, Idon’t like it.

SS: The reason I brought up “The Necessary Lie” is because I was wondering what criticisms you have of theCore as it is today.

JS: Well there’s not enough of it, first of all. I understand why, and now I withdraw my understanding of why. Iwas told [curtailing the Core] was done to increase electivity, and I think electivity is a good idea. I also thinkbeing told what you should do is also a good idea, as long as there are options. But it turns out that’s not actuallyhow it’s been used. It’s been used to carve out spaces for double majors, to which I am unalterably opposed. Onemajor is bad enough. I would like to abolish majors altogether. So two is unbelievable. And then you find out oneis for mommy and daddy and one is for you, so then I thought let’s take this issue head-on and stop this crap. Itseems to me that majors ought to be flexible enough that if you were in history and then suddenly said my realinterest is in biology, they might say, “Well, why don’t you look into the history of biology”—I mean we’ve got awhole fucking library called the Crerar Library of the History of Science. I mean, they ought to be able to findsome way to fit you in.No, I think the Core, if it were a Core, is terrific. Now, the thing about a Core is it really has to represent ahard-won faculty consensus. I mean, it can’t be “we’ll put this one in for that group, and we’ll put this one in forthat group.” It has to be that of all the books we could possibly inflict on you—only in 10 weeks, and you wastethe first week, you waste the last week, so you’ve got eight weeks. If they’re not crazy, they’re going to take twoweeks to read a book. So you’re down to four books. Now what that Core really ought to be doing is saying that ifthere were only these four books in the world—or the other way around, out of all the books in the world, theseare the four books you should read. If they’re not prepared to say that, they should shut up shop. That’s my firstcomment. I find too much politics, too much accommodation. “We can’t get the so-and-sos to join us unless weread this.” And they don’t care what it is, it’s got to be a little bit of this, or the economists won’t join the socialscience core, or something.

That’s the first issue. The second issue is I really think that if it’s a Core, there shouldn’t be so many of them. Howcan you say “we hold these truths to be self-evident, and by the way we’ve got eight sets of truths. You can choosewhich one you’d like to take.” I’m not a fan of the fantasy of the Core in the days when on Wednesday, April 8,every student was reading exactly the same page of Plato. It’s the automaton theory of uniformity. I mean, stickwith one or two, but then it’s five, six, seven, eight. The word fundamental means something or it doesn’t meansomething. And somehow, eight’s too big. And I don’t think they’ve made a hardcore argument. Half the timethey got pissed off with this Core, so it went off on its own, like, Protestantism and went off to build a church oftheir own. And then you ask who are they’re speaking for. Now as soon as they’ve done that, after all theexcitement of designing it, then they no longer want to teach it. Then they start screaming for graduate students orHarper something-or-others to come in and do it for them. So the other problem with the Core is there’s notenough senior faculty. The more introductory you get, the more gray hair you have to have. Introducing is an oldperson’s game; it’s not a young person’s game. A young person has just spent years becoming the world’s experton some itty-bitty little thing. And that’s the last person in the world you suddenly give the overview. They’vestudied one little city or one little group, and now you tell them “all of social science.” It makes no sense.


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I once sat down at this long table in the Stanford faculty club. I was giving a lecture, and some people weresupposed to meet me but I didn’t know who they were. So I sort of looked and waved, and they were very affable,they waved back! So I sat down. Turned out it was a group of physicists. So I thought, ‘I’ll just eavesdrop untilsomeone finds me.’ And they were having an argument about how whether so and so was old enough to teachPhysics 101. Their phrase was ‘senior enough.’ I mean, that was their argument. So I think that’s something weought to be serious about. I don’t think that “Lie” thing was a great piece of work; it was an informal presentation.But you’ve got to think through—you can’t just think about a particular text. You’ve got to spend timeintroducing. I find that the more I know as a scholar, the more I need to use all of that when I introduce. Becauseout of all the things I know, I have to pick the things that I want you to know about. And I have to know damnwell why it is that I picked this rather than that. I find that every skill I’ve picked up over the years is involved inmaking those decisions. It’s better than a Nobel Prize, it’s the most important thing we do. Because, just likereligions, we don’t study ourselves. We’re transmitting. The great unstudied area of religion we don’t study iseducation—how are they transmitted? It’s not just mommy-to-baby; it’s a whole apparatus they have. And howdoes that work? And is it similar or different? Religion and education—I mean, we’re used to that as a lawsuittopic, but…most educational systems started off being run by religions. But prior to having a former system theyhad other systems. Anyway, that’s digressing. But the transmitting is a big part of what any cultural system does.That’s what makes it a cultural system. That’s why so much public funds go to supporting it.I mean, I used to be the Dean of the College, and I’d have to speak to the Board of Trustees. I just said two thingsto them: that we’re the first country in the history of the world to have more teachers than farmers. That’s anincredible statement. Now partly it’s because these huge agri-businesses don’t need many people, they just need tospread their shitty stuff all over things. So it’s a little bit of a fake figure, but it was trying to make a point [about]that. The second one, however—education is America’s biggest business. There’s four percent of our productdevoted to this. There’s more people employed in it than any other industry. Why has this country chosen to put somuch public and private wealth behind it? They must think it does something! So what do they think it does?Train you to turn a wrench—that’s not what it does. Even schools that do that, they get asked to do civics, theyhave to make you a better citizen—all this other stuff. Well, I think that should probably be in the hand of folkswho’ve thought about it. And I can think of nothing least likely that a third-year graduate student would have satdown and spent a lot of time—they may have read an article. Maybe they read an article by me because I spend anenormous amount of time just running around campus talking to graduate student groups who are about to teach.It worries me how many of them are about to teach, by the way.

So that’s what I—those are things, small things. I have no philosophical disagreement with the Core. And I startedoff not entirely persuaded by it. I looked at Chicago’s catalogue in high school, said, “My God, this is a fascistsystem.” Now in those days there was no option. For two years, it was St. John’s. For two years, you did whatthey Goddamn well told you to do. And I wasn’t ready for that. To me college meant free of being told what to do,so I wasn’t moved to that. A Quaker college like Haverford never told you; it might try to reach a consensus withyou and 24 hours later maybe you got there, but it never, never told you. So those are the kinds of things—and Ithink it’s got to be a requirement. So I think it’s a hurdle to jump over. “Now I got that finished with, now I go onto what I came here for.” When if we knew how to say it right, we’d say, “You schmuck, this is what you camehere for! The other stuff you can learn, just pick up a book, sit down and read it!” Now I think part of it is wedon’t do it enough. When I helped design the Lang College in New York—it’s part of the new school—a lot ofChicago people said it should be part of that school. So they knew about the Core and wanted to have one. What Isaid was something I used to do, again when I was younger, since I was the one in charge by the president to dothe blueprint I could say things like this, “I’m not going to recommend it unless they all repeat the Core theirsenior year.” One quarter of it. Because that’s when you know what you’ve learned.

I used to invite my class to dinner their senior year. I would pick one chapter of one of the things we read and said,“It’s going to be like Plato’s symposium, I’m going to assign dinner table conversation.” I’d have enough wineand booze, Coca-Cola for those who won’t, to keep the conversation moving, but we’re going to sit around andtalk about that book. It was not what we were going to do because as they sat down I reached under the table, in a


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careful style handed a Xerox copy, each one of the papers they had written. And whether they got an A or a D,they were outraged by what they had written. And I said, “That’s what I want you to know.” Our gradingsystem—we don’t give a lot of Ds and Fs—our grading system doesn’t allow us to tell you how much you’vegrown. Chances are you got some Bs the first year; you’re going to get some Bs the senior year. On the averagethat’s the way it works. My God, what a difference between the B paper you wrote your last year and the B paperyou wrote your first year. If you don’t know that, you ought to get your money back. And by the way if it’s notbetter, you ought to get your money back, too. [Former U of C President] Hanna Gray heard I started makingsentences like this when I was teaching—”you know if you say things like that it’s not hyperbole. You’re puttingus on the line, shut up with all the you’ll-get-your-money-back talk!”But I really feel that schools—I hate these senior projects. They’re absolute—every educational test of them wehave say that they’re an utter waste of time. They’re a make-believe M.A. thesis or a make-believe doctoral thesis,and they’re just a way of hiring graduate students to be lectors. They have more Latin names for them—rectors,lectors, preceptors—I never heard of so much Latin around this Protestant university! It’s Baptist, we don’t speakLatin! But this business of having a portfolio—that I believe in. Saving your papers and being required to talkabout them your last year. Is it Wellesley? One fine girls’ school—I don’t even know if it still is, but a requiredproject for a history student to take a paper you wrote your sophomore or junior year and write an outline of howyou would change it. Don’t rewrite it—just tell us how you would do it differently. Because if you can’t do that,what the hell have you learned? It’s this production of…I’ve read a lot of them. They’re not all that good. It’s a lotof busy work, a lot of rummaging up notes and footnotes and that kind of stuff, and it’s not clear to me that—Imean I would get rid of the dissertation, too, if you allowed it, but that’s another topic. But I certainly don’t want afake one. I think all people have spent almost their entire year doing that. And it cannot be worth it. I think youought to…visit where you were and see how far you’ve come. That’s good for you, it’s good for us. It’s trouble foryou; it’s trouble for us. We have to find a way of thinking, we ought to find a way of handling that issue. If notgetting your money back, we ought to do something about it. So that’s—I mean that’s what I don’t like. It’s thatnothing’s comparable to the Core your senior year. And there should be. It could be one of these—this big ideasclass, why can’t you have a big ideas seminar for every single major? Constructed by its major, but all take thesame topic…however many win the lottery or however the hell you get into that Goddamn class. So seniorseminars are good—what we’re saying is that this is general education that will give you something to serve youwell, whatever you specialize in—well, we ought to test the premise out. Let’s test it. Let’s say, “Well, now you’velearned some special things, let’s go back to that and see what difference it makes.” And it should make adifference. Doesn’t mean you say it’s crap, but you should be able to read it differently because you’ve spent twoor three years more focused. Well great, let’s test it! Is it true?

So those are the things. I don’t think they take it seriously enough, and so it’s now become requirements,something you get over with your first two years. Or some hang on hoping that it’ll be abolished, so you get thereally pissed-off seniors because they’re sure it’s going to be abolished next year, but Goddamn it they still have totake it! And all of that nonsense. So I would have added—they’re shrinking, I would’ve added. I wouldn’t askcollege to fit so comfortably with graduate school. After all, despite our faculty fantasies, the vast majority of ourstudents don’t go on to arts and sciences graduate schools. We fudge it by saying we go on to—they go on tomedical school, business school, law school. And somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to 10 percent becomeclones of us. But we teach this entire College as if it’s only purpose is producing clones of ourselves. And so that’swhy we’re going to do the research skills in your senior year for graduate schools. Got news for you folks, that’snot where they’re going! They’re voting with their feet, they don’t want to be like you! They want to be likemommy and daddy, and they sure as hell don’t want to be like you! They’re going to go off and make money!

SS: So when you were Dean, did you make [these kinds of] changes?

JS: I made some changes, but not a lot. What I tried to do was to try to make talk about education something thatwas routinely part of the faculty’s concern…. I thought we’d have discussions. So I’d form a presentation, bringup something from some educational newspaper, or something I heard at a conference, and try to talk about–try tosuggest that college teaching is an intellectually interesting topic to think about. That it’s not some extra-even


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some extra burden. They don’t get as much work as they should. It’s a no man’s land. That means they get it in themajor courses. And increasingly, which I despise, I see courses limited to majors only, which is absolutelyhorrendous. Some people have double majors, I don’t know what this means, but anyway it’s limited to majorsonly. It’s too big otherwise. So then hire more faculty. Not going to happen.

I think, I once made the statement that I think if you’re going to teach college students you need to know as muchabout late adolescent developmental cognition as you know about your own field. You have no right going in frontof them and not knowing where they are. I mean I don’t know whether the work of that terrific feminist at Harvardis still holding, where she says ‘show me a paper and I’ll tell you what year it is.’ And it goes through-a first-yearwill buy anything from anyone with authority. A second-year won’t buy anything from anybody, no matter howauthoritative. Finally by the fourth year they learn what you call contextualization. Take some of it and leave someof it, they’re able to take what they’re reading, not just thinking they’re going to push a black button or a redbutton. For the first two years it’s button-pushing largely. And you ought to know that! It makes a difference towhat your expectations are in a class! And also what you want to do in a class. If I’ve got a class I know hasmostly second-year students, they’re not going to take any shit from anybody, then I’m going to give them a lot ofshit. And I’ll argue about every goddamn thing they say, and I ought to know that! I wouldn’t do that the first year.So, I just think that there’s more meat on those bones than the faculty knows. And I think it’s okay to talk about it,we don’t always have to talk about the crap we talk about in faculty meetings. And again I think you can’t ask,you’re responsible to ask people who themselves are struggling for a degree to now not only show up, do thereadings, maybe even think about the readings, before they walk in, but now know something about Carol what’s-her-name’s theory of-no, you know, and worry about how does the Harvard model of general education applies tothe Chicago model applies to-no, that’s not the world they are ready yet to live in.

So those are the things-I love the idea of the Core. When I was an adolescent and looked at it I thought it wasabsolutely insufferable. And I don’t think I like St. John’s. that eliminates the tension which ought to beinteresting. And this thing really is an hourglass-you start broad, you specialize, then you get broad. When youspecialize you ought to be intelligently broad, not be even more narrow. And that’s what I’d like to see the Coreallow. I think it doesn’t pull off-so it leaves this as a sort of ‘well everyone does it, let’s learn a little about this andlittle about that, isn’t that nice? And the next strand is to get some writing in there’…That’s overlooking the factthat writing for one subject matter is not the same as writing for other subject matter.

The other thing I got out of that book Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! that I quoted in that speech is that…aguy wins a Nobel Prize in one science and gets laughed at for writing something in another science, not because ofwhat he did, but because they thought it was important. At least in this book, I haven’t read the rest. This is a guy Isee in the bookstore, of course there are tapes to sit and listen to Feynman in the same way there are now tapes offolks speaking beyond the grave, but you sit around and listen to the tapes! You get an aura. [Tries to eat achocolate drop that came with his espresso without interrupting the flow of the conversation.] Oh I’ll have anotherone…very discreetly.

SS: No, go ahead!

JS: My wife will come back and she’ll say, ‘your disposition’s unusually sweet today!’ It’s an itty-bitty littlething! [He eats the chocolate drop.] Majors I think are of no use to anybody.

SS: I really agree.

JS: I mean it’s…It’s not real! It’s all sort of simulated, and they keep telling you it doesn’t get real until-I don’tknow what the hell happened, but when I was in my first year of graduate school I didn’t feel a tingle th

SUPRIYA SINHABABU

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Full J. Z. Smith Interview